James Garner hospitalized after minor stroke
LOS ANGELES - James Garner, who was hospitalized late last week after suffering a minor stroke, is doing well and should be going home shortly, the veteran television and film star's publicist said Tuesday.
The star of such TV shows as "Maverick" and "The Rockford Files" went to the hospital after becoming ill at home Friday, said his publicist, Jennifer Allen.
"He's still in the hospital but my understanding is he is doing well and will be going home soon. When, exactly, we have not been told yet," Allen told The Associated Press.
Garner, who turned 80 last month, rose to prominence in the 1950s as the star of "Maverick," playing a wry riverboat gambler who was quicker with a quip than a gun and, unlike his Western counterparts, was faster still to run from trouble than to face it. The show aired from 1957 to 1962 but Garner, who was nominated for an Emmy as Bret Maverick, left in 1960 to pursue a film career.
He has appeared in such films as "The Children's Hour," "Victor/Victoria," "The Great Escape" and was nominated for an Oscar in 1985 as the small-town pharmacist opposite Sally Field in "Murphy's Romance."
Garner returned to television full-time in the mid-1970s, playing Jim Rockford, a modern-day private detective who, like his "Maverick" character, also was not afraid to run instead of fight. He won an Emmy for the role in 1977.
Garner also reprised his Maverick role in the short-lived "Bret Maverick" series in the 1980s.
More recently, he played Katey Sagal's father in the sitcom "8 Simple Rules ... For Dating My Teenage Daughter." Garner joined the cast in 2003 after John Ritter, who played Sagal's husband, died during the show's second season.
Weinsteins roll with 'Fraggle Rock'
The Weinstein Co. is reviving Jim Henson series 'Fraggle Rock' as a live-action musical pic.
The Weinstein Co. will turn the Jim Henson series "Fraggle Rock" into a live-action musical feature.
Cory Edwards, who directed the animated "Hoodwinked!" for TWC, will helm the picture and write the screenplay. The Jim Henson Co. will produce and TWC will distribute.
Just like the series, the film will be populated by a mix of human characters and Fraggle Rock puppets. TWC co-chair Harvey Weinstein, who has been steering his company more aggressively into the family film arena, made the marriage with Lisa Henson, who runs JHC with her co-CEO brother, Brian Henson.
Ahmet Zappa will be exec producer with Brian Inerfeld.
Pic will take the core characters Gobo, Wembley, Mokey, Boober and Red outside of their home in Fraggle Rock, where they interact with humans, which they think are aliens. The show premiered on HBO in 1983, ran five seasons and was broadcast in more than 80 countries. It posted strong sales recently when the first three seasons were released on DVD.
The deal furthers the relationship between TWC and the "Hoodwinked!" creative team. Edwards is reteaming with "Hoodwinked!" co-writer Tony Leech on the animated alien adventure "Escape From Planet Earth," on which Leech is making his directing debut.
Edwards is separately developing a live-action feature adaptation of Cedar Fair's Halloween Haunt franchise, designed to be shot in 3-D by Kerner Optical and produced by Davis Entertainment, Dave Phillips and Tracey Edmonds. That pic is looking for a backer.
"One of our main priorities when we first launched the Weinstein Company was to feature a broad range of family-friendly franchises like 'Fraggle Rock,' " Weinstein said.
Country and pop stars get back together for songs, tours
Country and pop music's on-again, off-again romance is heating up.
Sammy Hagar is playing stadium dates with Kenny Chesney. Brooks & Dunn is co-headlining with ZZ Top. CMT is airing Tim McGraw's Nine Lives duet with Def Leppard. And Dierks Bentley is booked for alt-rock festival Lollapalooza.
In the past, acts from the Eagles to Aaron Neville occasionally have gotten country airplay. Now, the two genres seem closer on the country chart than they've been in years.
Jewel and Hootie & The Blowfish's Darius Rucker, the '90s pop favorites, have singles on the country chart. Blake Shelton recently recast Michael Bublé's 2005 hit Home as a country song, and Sugarland covered the Dream Academy's 1986 hit Life in a Northern Town on last month's CMT Music Awards. Garth Brooks cut Workin' for a Livin' with original singer Huey Lewis. Newcomers Rissi Palmer and David Nail have covered Jordin Sparks' No Air and Train's I'm About to Come Alive, respectively.
The influx of pop songs and acts doesn't surprise Gregg Swedberg, program director for country station KEEY-FM in Minneapolis. "People are smart about (their) audience," he says. "They're playing to a group that's older than top 40 and predominantly white, predominantly pop- and R&B-based with a rock sensibility."
Shelton found Home on his iPod after girlfriend Miranda Lambert uploaded it without telling him. "The more I listened, the more I thought, 'That's not just an adult-contemporary record, that's a country hit, too,' " Shelton says.
Some of country's acknowledgement of the download generation's diverse tastes can be traced to CMT Crossroads, which regularly features country and pop acts playing together. Chart-topping collaborations between Reba McEntire and Kelly Clarkson, and Bon Jovi and Sugarland's Jennifer Nettles, resulted from Crossroads.
"Crossroads is just the first televised manifestation of something that already existed," says CMT executive vice president Brian Philips.
The romance between country and pop could be nothing more than a summer fling — although Robert Plant was serious enough about touring with bluegrass chanteuse Alison Krauss in support of their critically acclaimed album Raising Sand that he shrugged off the possibility of a lucrative Led Zeppelin reunion.
Philips says some cultural differences that once divided country and pop performers may be disappearing.
"There's no artist under 30 — and probably under 40 — who was not raised in a diverse musical environment," he says. "It's the rare exception who comes through our doors and says, 'The only thing I've heard all my life is country music.' "
Shelton doesn't see that as a bad thing: "It's good for everybody that it's starting to mix up."
Von Trapp's "Sound of Music" villa to become hotel
SALZBURG, Austria (Reuters) - "The Sound of Music," one of Hollywood's greatest money-spinners, will scale new heights when the original von Trapp family villa near Salzburg opens as a hotel in July.
The 1965 film based on the true story of how aspiring nun Maria sang her way into the hearts of Baron von Trapp and his seven children has provided fans with a host of must-have items.
The Villa Trapp hotel will give visitors a chance to sleep in the family's former bedrooms or get married in their chapel.
And the gazebo where Liesl, eldest of the von Trapp daughters in the film, and her boyfriend Rolf meet secretly and perform "Sixteen going on 17" will also be available as a self-assembly construction set.
"The hotel really is a milestone for the commercialization of The Sound Of Music for Salzburg," said Leo Bauernberger from the Salzburg provincial tourism board. "The Sound of Music is well and truly a stroke of luck for this city."
The film, which starred Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer and was based on a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, has inspired sing-along shows worldwide, a drinking game, a self-healing CD and a Maria Barbie doll.
U.S. ticket tracking site www.boxofficemojo.com ranks "The Sound of Music" as the third most successful movie of all time on the domestic market, taking inflation into account, topped only by "Gone With the Wind" and "Star Wars."
"It is hard to imagine that anyone hasn't seen it and it is still passed down the generations," Graham Hales, brand specialist at Interbrand, told Reuters. "It is a property."
SOUND OF MUSIC RINGS TILLS IN SALZBURG
The von Trapp family lived in the villa outside Salzburg from 1923 to 1938 before fleeing the Nazi takeover of Austria. Nazi security chief Heinrich Himmler used the villa as a home close to the Austrian Alps until 1945.
A missionary order bought the residence after World War Two and has agreed to relinquish it for use as a hotel. Entrepreneurs plan to make no alterations to the building other than essentials such as painting and rewiring.
In Salzburg, visitors from North America, Asia and Britain, where the film has been very popular, generate some 700,000 overnight stays every year, according to tourism officials.
For 40 percent of them, the film is the sole reason for their visit. Seeing the film's original locations is for many, like Lana Wright from New Zealand, a dream came true.
"It was almost a feeling like 'you've come home'," said Wright, 53, with watery eyes, stepping off a tour bus.
"Finally I have arrived, arrived somewhere where I was supposed to be, somewhere that I was supposed to see."
Hales said The Sound of Music, by featuring goodies and baddies, heroes who stand up to do the right thing and a heartening depiction of strong family bonds, will be appealing to generations to come.
"The whole story is simply so beautiful -- here in Salzburg, with the scenery, the people, the whole story line -- it's just a classic," said Laura Ude from the United States.
ABC's fall schedule features only 2 new shows
NEW YORK - ABC will add only one new scripted series in the fall, plus a new game show, in a schedule that network executives admit was severely affected by the 100-day writers strike that concluded in February.
The new David E. Kelley-produced drama, "Life on Mars," is about a police detective transported back to 1973. ABC gave it a plum Thursday time slot following "Grey's Anatomy."
The second new series, "Opportunity Knocks," is a game where producers show up at a home with a truckload of prizes and quiz family members on what they know about each other.
ABC is also picking up the NBC comedy "Scrubs" for midseason. ABC Entertainment President Stephen McPherson, who has feuded with his NBC counterpart Ben Silverman, noted Tuesday that the comedy had 17 different time slots at NBC and received little promotion.
Like its rivals, ABC has suffered a decline in ratings this season. Its executives were encouraged, however, that ABC won among the coveted 18-to-49-year-old demographic for seven of 10 weeks last fall before the strike and Fox's "American Idol" buried it.
All of the major broadcast networks are presenting their schedules to advertisers this week except for NBC, which announced its plans last month.
McPherson has been bold in the past in bringing forward new shows: ABC had eight last fall. But the strike impaired development. ABC has 17 series in development for midseason or beyond, but McPherson said he wasn't comfortable committing to new series unless pilots had been filmed.
"If you needed a ton of development for the fall schedule, the strike would have been a really bad bet," he said. "You'd have to rush it or put stuff on before you knew what it was."
The result is another chance for series that in normal years may not have gotten one, such as "Eli Stone," "Pushing Daisies" or "Dirty Sexy Money." Some longer-running shows considered on the bubble, "Boston Legal" and "According to Jim," were kept in production. "Boston Legal" will move to Mondays in the fall.
"Lost" will be back in midseason next year.
It was a good day for Ashton Kutcher, too. His production company is behind "Opportunity Knocks" and an untitled beauty pageant picked up for midseason. ABC also gave a midseason go-ahead to a Mike Judge animated series, "The Goode Family," about people obsessed with doing the right thing.
"Notes From the Underbelly," "Men in Trees," "October Road" and "Women's Murder Club" were left off ABC's schedule.
The newsmagazine `20/20" will return, and ABC has also asked its news division to make more of the "Primetime" shows where people are tested by being put in different social situations.
Broadcast networks will need to make a special effort this fall to counter lingering effects of the strike, he said. ABC plans to devote more promotional time than it normally does to returning shows instead of new series, he said.
"We certainly saw the affect of the strike," McPherson said. "People found other things to do."